Talia Mae Bettcher

In her book Ontology and Oppression, Katharine Jenkins defends a framework for the ontology of social kinds that is impressive in both its systematicity and explanatory power. My central concern, however, is that Jenkins seems to merely assume a separation between semantics and ontology—a separation that needs to be investigated and defended more fully. This presumption, I conclude, undermines the ability of her account to answer the question of what a woman is, as well as raising worries about potential misgendering.

This section includes eighty-six short original essays commissioned for the inaugural issue of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly. Written by emerging academics, community-based writers, and senior scholars, each essay in this special issue, “Postposttranssexual: Key Concepts for a Twenty-First-Century Transgender Studies,” revolves around a particular keyword or concept. Some contributions focus on a concept central to transgender studies; others describe a term of art from another discipline or interdisciplinary area and show how it might relate to transgender studies. While far from providing a complete picture of the field, these keywords begin to elucidate a conceptual vocabulary for transgender studies. Some of the submissions offer a deep and resilient resistance to the entire project of mapping the field terminologically; some reveal yet-unrealized critical potentials for the field; some take existing terms from canonical thinkers and develop the significance for transgender studies; some offer overviews of well-known methodologies and demonstrate their applicability within transgender studies; some suggest how transgender issues play out in various fields; and some map the productive tensions between trans studies and other interdisciplines.

This chapter introduces the notion of “interpersonal spatiality” (the capacity of sensory and discursive encounters to admit of intimacy and distance). It examines the constitution of nakedness and sexual desire within what the author calls the sex-representational system of interpersonal spatiality. In this system, one’s public gender presentation communicates the moral structure of one’s nakedness, which is the source of transphobic invalidation. The system is also an aspect of what María Lugones calls the colonial/modern gender system. Specifically, the sex-representational system grounded the colonial “primitivization” of nonwhite individuals as well as the contrast between sexual objectification and sexual animalization, emphasized by Patricia Hill Collins. The chapter concludes with a preliminary analysis of pornography that draws on this account.

This dissertation concerns an important dispute between George Berkeley and David Hume. The dispute involves Berkeley's defense of his conception of the self as a spirit, a purely active being which perceives ideas; and Hume's elimination of that conception via his own, according to which the self is merely a heap, a causally connected system of perceptions. At bottom, this difference in the way that the self is conceptualized is informed by a fundamental difference in philosophical starting-point. Berkeley seeks to extricate philosophers from skepticism and perplexity; and he desires to restore them to virtue by demonstrating the natural immortality of the soul. Hume, by contrast, wants to construct a science of the mind; and he hopes to encourage modesty in philosophical opinion by promoting a skepticism about bold metaphysical doctrines such as the immortality of the soul. ;Since Berkeley's account has frequently been dismissed as inconsequential, while Hume's account has been accorded philosophical honor, a large part of this project consists in demonstrating the worth of the former. In chapter I, I defend Berkeley's conception of spirit against a traditional objection that it is really just a conflicted Humean account. I argue that a demonstration of the immortality of the soul is central to Berkeley's agenda, flowing from his deep distinction between spirit and idea. In chapter II, I argue that Berkeley effectively abandons the Aristotelian/scholastic distinction between substance and accident, thereby leading him to draw this distinction between spirit and idea. In chapter III, I show how this ontological transformation leads Berkeley to deny that spirit can be perceived, and thereby provides him with a response to skepticism about the soul. In chapter IV, I argue that Hume theoretically eliminates Berkeleian spirit by reconceptualizing the self as a heap of perceptions, motivated by his project of constructing a science of the mind.

This essay examines the stereotype that transgender people are “deceivers” and the stereotype's role in promoting and excusing transphobic violence. The stereotype derives from a contrast between gender presentation and sexed body. Because gender presentation represents genital status, Bettcher argues, people who “misalign” the two are viewed as deceivers. The author shows how this system of gender presentation as genital representation is part of larger sexist and racist systems of violence and oppression.

This paper examines Harold Garfinkel's notion of the natural attitude about sex and his claim that it is fundamentally moral in nature. The author looks beneath the natural attitude in order to explain its peculiar resilience and oppressive force. There she reveals a moral order grounded in the dichotomously sexed bodies so constituted through boundaries governing privacy and decency. In particular, naked bodies are sex-differentiated within a system of genital representation through gender presentation—a system that helps constitute the very boundaries between the public and private.

This article introduces trans feminism as an intersectional analysis of sexist and transphobic forms of oppressions as well as current and historical feminist and trans conflicts over the inclusion of trans women. The first half examines recent feminist philosophical efforts to provide an analysis of the concept woman that is inclusive of trans women. The second examines recent responses to trans-exclusive feminist positions. The article concludes with an assessment of the current state of trans feminist philosophy and outlines challenges for the future.

In this article, Bettcher argues that sexual attraction must be reconceptualized in light of transgender experience. In particular, Bettcher defends the theory of “erotic structuralism,” which replaces an exclusively other-directed account of gendered attraction with one that includes a gendered eroticization of self as an essential component. This erotic experience of self is necessary for other-directed gendered desire, where the two are bound together and mutually informing. One consequence of the theory is that the controversial notion of “autogynephilia” is rejected. Another consequence is that the distinction between gender identity and sexual orientation is softened.